I
spent the rest of that afternoon and a good part of the following day
reading most of the archives of The BBQ Forum, something that one could
actually accomplish back when that forum was only about two years old. Up until that
time, I had never contemplated making my own slow-cooked barbecue. Yes, I
had grilled ribs on my Weber Genesis gas grill, and I enjoyed eating
barbecue at Armadillo Willy's,
my favorite local joint, but it was not until I stumbled into The BBQ
Forum that I realized that people actually cooked real barbecue in their
own backyards. So I owe Ray Basso a great big "thank you" for introducing
me to the wonderful world of barbecue.

What's This WSM Thing?

As I read through the posts, a cooker called the
Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker kept popping up
again and again. People were using it in the
backyard and in competition, and they were winning contests with it. I
read posts by Mike Scrutchfield and Elizabeth Lumpkin and Jim Minion, all
singing the praises of this cooker. I figured that if this WSM thing was
good enough for them, it would certainly be good enough for me, and I was
already a big fan of Weber products, so all the more reason to buy one.

On April 17, 1997 I went
to Barbeques Galore in Palo Alto and bought a WSM for $189. This was back
in the day before the WSM was widely available online at places like
Amazon.com.

I fired up the cooker using the
instructions in the Owner's Manual (the first of many mistakes made over
the years) and cooked two slabs of baby back
ribs using a commercial rub from the grocery store. I finished the ribs
with Armadillo Willy's barbecue sauce about 40 minutes before the end of
the cook.

My notes from those first
ribs:

Good smoky smell and
taste.

Not spicy or salty
enough.

Not enough sauce.

Get longer matches or
a butane lighter.

Get a small watering
can.

Make sure plenty of
charcoal is on-hand.

Not bad for the first
time!

Attending Paul Kirk's
Class

A
few days after my first cook, I learned that Paul Kirk would be coming
to Northern California to conduct his Barbecue School of
Pitmasters class at Armadillo Willy's. How cool would it be to
hang-out all day in the parking lot of my favorite barbecue restaurant,
learning how to make barbecue from one of the best in the business?

I attended
the class on May 3, 1997 and cooked my first brisket, pork butt,
spare ribs, and whole chicken on that day. Surprisingly, my cooking partner and I won a 2nd place ribbon for pork butt in the mock competition during the
class!

Beginnings
Of A Website

After about six months of WSM ownership, I had a fair amount of cooking
experience under my belt, and I'd collected a lot of tips and tricks about
how to best operate the cooker. I kept
all my notes neatly organized by category in a bright red binder. One day,
as I was leafing through the binder, it dawned on me that I had enough
information for the makings of a website. Wouldn't it be great to put all
this stuff online into a single, well-organized site that was dedicated
to owners of the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker? And what about
people who wanted to see the WSM before buying it, but couldn't find one
in a local retail store? Maybe I could include photos showing what
the cooker looked like and how all the pieces went together.

So, in the Fall of 1997, I started tinkering
with a website. I didn't know much about web pages or HTML at the time, so
I thought this would also be a good opportunity to learn some new technical skills.
However, I soon
got distracted by other things and lost interesting in the website.

Fast forward to May 1998.
I was still cooking up a storm on my WSM and collecting information in my
now bulging red binder. One day I was browsing several barbecue websites,
and I thought to myself, "I can make a site that's every bit as good as
these." In the interim, I had acquired more HTML skills, so I felt
more sure of my technical abilities. I also felt that the WSM was a
fantastic product that didn't get the attention it deserved from Weber; in
fact, it barely got a mention on their corporate website.

With new motivation, I dusted off the
web pages that I'd
set aside and started work again. I took photos of the WSM with my 35mm
film camera and used a scanner to get them into electronic format.

The website started out
with just four sections, all of which fit on a single floppy disk—with
lots of room to spare:

The Weber Bullet Tour

Usage Tips &
Techniques

Smokin' Links

BBQ Resources

On June 12, 1998, I
uploaded the site to the free hosting space provided by my Internet Service
Provider, and The Virtual Weber Bullet was born. The URL was www.concentric.net/~callingh until September 1999 when I
registered the domain name www.virtualweberbullet.com.

Here We Grow!

From those first four sections in 1998, TVWB expanded to include a
cooking section (1999), a discussion forum (2000), a shopping section
(2000), and a videos section (2007). Today, the site features over 200 articles
and videos covering a wide range of
topics, including recipes, cooking techniques, usage tips, and WSM
modifications.

In 2000, my friend
Kevin
Kawahara encouraged me to create a bulletin board dedicated to the WSM.
While not wanting to take anything away from other forums, I felt that the
WSM had a large enough following
that it deserved its own place for discussion on the Web. After all, if
the Big Green Egg, Kamado, and Klose cookers had their own
dedicated forums, why not the WSM?

With Kevin's help,
The Virtual Weber Bulletin Board
went live on February 6, 2000. It used Infopop's Ultimate Bulletin Board
software and ran on a server with a Comcast high speed internet
connection in Kevin's spare bedroom. Kevin was system administrator for
the bulletin board until June 2004, when Comcast cracked down on
bandwidth usage and ruined the nice little arrangement we had going. After a
few frantic days of transition, the bulletin board moved to Infopop's Groupee
hosted service on June 9, 2004.

Over the next 8
years, the discussion forums grew tremendously, with over 8,000
registered members and hundreds of thousands of posts. In 2011 and 2012,
it became clear that The Virtual Weber Bulletin Board needed to move to
a new platform, as the hosted service was not staying competitive with
other platforms, both in terms of cost and features. With some help from a company called URLJet, we moved the forums to vBulletin
software on a new, more efficient hosting service in July, 2012.

But back to Kevin
Kawahara for a second...I can't thank him enough for his
generous contributions to our online community in those early days. Without him, the bulletin
board would
not have happened.

Special Projects

I've had the privilege
of using TVWB to help charitable causes over the years, but there are
two instances that really stand out for me, and both had to do with
customized WSMs.

In the past few
years, my focus has been on going back and re-cooking,
re-photographing, and re-writing some of the earliest articles on TVWB.
I've learned a lot over the years, and I would not necessarily do things
today the same way I did them 10 or 12 years ago, so a lot of effort has
gone into updating some of the oldest content on the website.

One of the really
satisfying things to have happened in the last few years is
WSM Smoke Day. Started in 2005 at the suggestion of discussion forum
member Joel Kiess, Smoke Day is held each
year on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. On that day, WSM owners
barbecue with family and friends, then report back
on the bulletin board with their results and photos. It's great to see
the fun that people have in their backyards with the WSM, and it's
amazing to see the scope of participation in
the U.S. and many countries around the world.

And TVWB has reached
out to you via
Facebook and Twitter,
as well as through our monthly
newsletter, to keep you informed about what's happening with the
website and to provide you a chance to talk back to TVWB!

Support From People
Like You

Today, we live in a
world where so many services are available online for free, including
web searches, e-mail, photo sharing, video sharing, blogging,
podcasting, and so much more. But companies have to pay for the free
services we enjoy, and they usually pay for it by trying to sell
advertising.

From the very beginning,
TVWB has provided you with quality information that is offered free of
charge. But there is a fair amount of cost associated with delivering a
website that serves up millions of pages a year to hundreds of thousands
of readers. I've paid for some of that out of my own pocket, but TVWB readers have graciously supported the
website by
shopping Amazon.com, with each
sale generating a small commission that helps defray the cost of bringing
you TVWB. The creation of a dedicated shopping
page in 2000 and the addition of new
support methods like
PayPal donations and
TVWB logo merchandise
have made it even easier for people to help support the site. I want
to extend a special thanks to all that have contributed throughout the
years!

Gonna Keep On
Truckin'

Like I said before, it's hard to believe that
all these years have come and gone so quickly.
Yet sometimes, it feels like I've been at this for a very, very long time!
Month after month, creating new content and updating old articles. Fixing
broken links. Replacing old photos with new ones. I can't even
begin to count the hours I've spent sitting in front of my computer
creating and maintaining TVWB.

Why do I keep doing it?
Certainly not for money. Certainly not for
attention, because I'm not very comfortable in the spotlight
and prefer to stay in the background. Certainly not for status in the
barbecue community, because I'm no expert—I'm just a backyard barbecuer
like most of you. Heck, I've even been accused of
being the "Betty Crocker of Barbecue"—not a real person at all, but
a fictitious persona dreamt up by the marketing gurus at Weber.

Well, I'm here to say
that I'm not Betty Crocker, and I don't work for Weber. I am a real person,
a humble student of the art and science of
barbecue, and I publish TVWB each month because it's fun. I get a great deal
of satisfaction from writing about barbecue. It's an outlet for my
creativity. It gives me a chance to tinker with projects like cooker modifications. It gives me a reason to buy
toys like probe thermometers and
digital cameras. It's a way to share my enthusiasm for barbecue and the
WSM with others.

But most importantly, I
do it because of the e-mails I get
from people like you telling me how much they enjoy the website and the
discussion forum. How it's introduced them to the joys of owning a Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker
and preparing delicious food
for family and friends...making barbecue for a daughter's wedding
rehearsal dinner...winning a ribbon in a barbecue contest...being a hero in your own backyard. Those
e-mails make it all worthwhile.

So in closing, let me
thank each of you for coming along with me on this long adventure into the
world of barbecue. Thanks to those who have offered words of encouragement
along the way, and thanks for taking interest in the content I've provided
over the years. If it weren't for all of you, there would be no point in
my doing any of this.

Best regards,Chris Allingham

Updated:
01/14/2018

The Virtual Weber Bullet is your best source for Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker information and discussion on the Web. Popular with competition barbecue teams, the WSM is an easy-to-use water smoker that's equally at home in the backyard. See the WSM and its component parts; get recipes, usage tips, and modification ideas; check-out BBQ-related resources; and discuss the WSM with owners and enthusiasts in our online forums.

The Virtual Weber Bullet is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program,
an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn
advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.